William Vollmann - The Atlas

She was dead now.

Close your eyes, bitch, he said to the slender girl. I don't want you looking into my eyes while I do this. Don't worry. I'll pay you one thousand baht.* Make a fist. Make a fist, I said. Yeah, that's a good vein. You got such pretty litde veins.

Thank you, sir.

OK, it's going in. Don't move. Don't move. There it goes.

Thank you very much, sir.

What the fuck are you thanking me for? I just murdered you.

Excuse me sir me no no understand you speak.

I apologize, he said. It's just that I've been feeling pretty down lately.

* About U.S. $40 in 1993. About what an all-night girl might expect to receive.

Outside the vast squares of yellow bookstore-light, the panhandlers, longhaired and greasy, held out their palms, asking for their dinners, and two started fighting, while inside people turned the pages of picture-books whose flowers smelled like meadows of fresh ink.

I don't want her around me! a panhandler shouted. I don't need that fucking bitch! I hate that monster.

Inside, everyone pretended that the shouting was silence. A man looked at a book and wanted to buy it, knowing how wonderful it would be to sit in his own house with a drink in his hand looking at this thirty-eight-color picture-book printed on paper as smooth as a virgin's thigh while the sun kept coming in through the leaves—

Outside, somebody screamed.

The man bought the book and went out. He saw a man smashing a woman's head against a window of the bookstore. The glass shattered, and as the woman's livid and half-dead face shot into the yellow light he saw it become beautiful like the planet Saturn ringed by arrowheads of whirling glass that rainbowed her in their cruel prisms and clung to wholeness in that spinning second also ringed by her hair and spattering blood.

The man ran back inside where the woman's mouth lay peaceful. He opened his book and invited her in. Gently he raised her head and pillowed the book beneath. Spangles of blood struck the pages like a misty rain, becoming words which had never existed before. She began to bleed faster and faster. Her hair grew down between the words like grass, underscoring and embellishing them with fragrant flourishes. Her eyes and teeth became punctuation marks. Her skin became pages of bloodless purity. Her flesh kept company with the threads and glue; the plates of her skull broke neatly into cover-armor. Then there was nothing left of her above the raw red throat.

He picked up the book, which spoke to him, saying: Now you have loved me, and I will love you forever. But where are my hands? Where are my feet, my breasts?

I'm sorry, the man said. They're outside.

Bring them in, the book told him. Bring them through the window.

Holding the book tight, the man ran out to obey her, but police had already condensed out of the night. When he tried to smash the corpse's shoulders through the window, they led him into the squad car. He knew that they would take him inside.

Where are my hands? the book wept.

They took you away, the man whispered.

The book began to bleed despondently.

Once when the thioridazine wore off he found himself with a Bible because they'd taken away the other book to be kept forever in a long manila envelope labeled EVIDENCE. But the woman he'd helped and loved had finally found him. She whispered to him from the Bible, telling him to ask them for an atlas, and when the psychiatrists agreed because that was a sign of healthy involvement with the world, he opened the atlas at random, and the wide heavy covers flipped down to anchor him in the new country which he would soon find; and he looked and read KAMPUCHEA. So he entered a dark-staired hallway without electricity in Phnom Penh, kids hopping barefoot everywhere, silhouettes in hallways, black crowds watching in the hallway, smells of sweat and body odor and death, fat girls peering out of a dark doorway, giggling. Three girls leaned out. Warily they smiled. The door opened on a sunny place where more fat girls peered out carefully. He stepped into the new part of the hall that the open door had made, the bright part, and they beckoned him in. People were watching. He stood there in the place between outside and inside, entering a nested memory of an openwalled restaurant not far away where he had sat, feeling neither inside nor outside, a Chinese movie shouting along on the TV, while boys rode past one and two to a bike; awnings swirled in the breeze. Then he came out of that memory and entered the open door. All the pretty girls sat on the floor or the rumpled bed, watching TV. The madam closed the door behind him and then he knew that he had truly been admitted to the inside. But he also knew that he could not stay. Sooner or later he'd have to rent one of the girls, or else they'd make him leave. And even if he did rent somebody, so that he could come inside her, eventually he'd finish or his money would be finished and then he'd have to go back into the black hall again, which was outside like the far side of Pluto.

He closed the atlas. They gave him two more pills and checked beneath his tongue to make sure that he had swallowed. Soon he could feel himself going inside again.

The woman whispered, so he opened the atlas; and the harbor burned with bluish-gray fog, cool winds ruffling nothing on the blocky buildings across the water which were backdropped by camel's back hills the same color as the fog. He went among the tea-colored faces in round glasses, became present on the ferry across the gray-green sea. The happiness of going without map or guidebook, having no idea what he'd find, prevented him from recognizing the danger of the tall white buildings like punchcards on the horizon.

Not only this outsider, whose education in boundaries had been so abundant, but also the other inhabitants of Hong Kong, that abstraction as readily graspable as a parallelogram, often heard a strange woman's voice calling to them from across the water, the voice of a woman neither inside nor outside, who therefore called from loneliness, wanting to be loved so that her hands at least could live with her brain and skull; but to most others her pathetic aspect, which did require something of them, made them prefer not to recognize her; of course it was also that they were completely inside, so that they had little use for somebody who was neither one nor the other. Better not to acknowledge any ghost. Of course he was compelled to, because he already had. It is not as easy to get rid of consequences as first principles. He heard her desperate whisperings as he got ofF the ferry and approached the bank walled with sparkling transparent cubicles in which people paced or pressed or sat downgazing at computer mysteries; in the lower levels, where the public was permitted to come, embankments of metal and marble gleamed like sunlight, while the uniformed ones swarmed safely behind. Below this was a glass floor of many rectangular panes, joined by silvery rods; beneath this the gloomy silhouettes of the lowest walkers passed at obscure diagonals, all at the same pace.

He descended the slow escalator that brought the red uniforms and red displays into broader angles like an airplane approaching the runway, falling from the ceiling, which was a Ptolemaic crystalline sphere.

To cross the street you took an escalator above the statued men at the bank, crossed a marble bridge of potted plants whose leaves gleamed almost as coldly as the black shoes of the officials who marched so soundlessly, followed the V's of darker marble like caramelized sugar on a pudding dessert, turned left at the stained glass window, and then you could look down at the red and silver taxis, the blue and tan double-decker buses, the gray cars and white cars— all very clean, of course — sliding below you along the immaculate street. Then you came to a glass door which let you outside. You followed a walled path, which traversed a steep hill bulging with ferns, lilies, ginkgo trees and tall palms whose tea-colored darknesses strained toward the glowing fog and were undone by the weight of their own success; their umbrellalike spreadings and droopings from the resolute stalk were a falling back of darkness into darkness. This was the Battery path: a pavement of roots, like the muscles in athletes' shoulders. This was a city of clean paths telling him which way to go.